Comedian Magda Szubanski isn't shy about calling out abuse and discrimination where she sees it — but it wasn't always that way. Ahead of the release of her new series, Magda's Big National Health Check, she reflects on how she's been impacted by weight stigma, diet culture and what happens when you speak up.
From the moment I started to put on a little bit of weight, my parents were on me about it. And, God bless them, not in a kind way.
All through my teen years, I was yelled at in the street. People wouldn't always say it out loud — although they do that, too — but it can just be the sort of contemptuous way that you're treated, like you're seen as a kind of non-person.
I remember years ago, when I wasn't even that overweight, I was on a plane with Gina Riley [who played Kim Craig in Kath and Kim] heading to Edinburgh Festival. I asked the flight attendant if I could have some more food and she just looked at me with utter contempt and said: "really, are you sure?"
Gina and I just looked at each other and laughed, it was so ridiculous.
Now there are a lot more fat people around — I use fat as a completely non-pejorative term — but when I started out there was just kind of me and [Australian fashion designer and media personality] Maggie Tabberer. That was about it.
I think because of my upbringing, though, I never felt like my weight meant I didn't have a right to be there. I'm not saying that society didn't think that, I'm saying it didn't make me feel as though I had no place in mainstream culture.
I just went ahead and did it.
Now the stereotype is that you're fat and miserable, whereas when I was younger, the stereotype was fat and jolly.
In a similar way to being gay, I probably have kept myself small, as it were, in my ambitions in some ways. But there's a split personality about these things, in that part of me is quite confident and would forge ahead, but another part of me, I'm sure, has not felt able to go as far as I possibly could.
Definitely, in terms of roles I've been considered for it's had an effect.
I don't see myself as a victim; I can see that there are inequities and inaccuracies, but that's very different to embodying victimhood. And I don't feel that I embody victimhood because I've just gotten on and done stuff, but that doesn't mean that I haven't noticed it — the prejudices, the biases, and discrimination.
The fact that some people feel they have the right to comment on someone else's health or their physicality, it says far more about the people making the comments than the people receiving them.
I don't want to be too heavy-handed about all of this stuff, but I do think there really needs to be a shift in attitudes towards fat people.
Drinking the diet culture Kool Aid
I'm very clear that I'm not promoting obesity, I'm about being as healthy as you can possibly be at whatever weight is achievable and maintainable for you. Because maintainable is the thing; we've all done the diets and the statistics are dire — only a tiny minority of people manage to keep the weight off.
It's what's sustainable and maintainable, that's far more challenging. I've lost weight before, and as my endocrinologist said, that drive to eat — the hunger drive — is very powerful.
I look back at that period of public weight loss and dieting with complex emotions and observations. The physical fitness I felt when I lost weight was terrific, but also, any kind of diet contributes to disordered eating.
The other thing people don't realise about me is that I was on an alternative medicine, wellness kick from the age of six when my father got a very serious cancer.
It was just a year after we got to Australia, and he pursued all those alternative medicines and then I was sent to a naturopath. I've been sold so much snake oil by alternative medical practitioners — but also been very helped by some.
It also promoted extreme ideas that were beyond my reach and weren't helpful to me.
Then all the diets I've been on, they just f–k with your metabolism something shocking.
Diet culture, and its worship and promotion of what it thinks to be the healthy ideal, really leaves a lot of us out of the picture.
I've had doctors say really awful things to me in the past, like "you need to lose weight" and I'll say, "what do you suggest I do?" And they say: "Eat less, move more". That's not even true, now there's much more understanding of the complex endocrinology for overweight people — there can be a lot going on.
On the show, the question is: how do I address these health issues without getting snared by the diet culture trap again? That's what is really hard. It's not about getting a dietician in and them telling me what to eat. I've done that a million times, my shelves are full of books and I've spent an enormous amount of money on that sort of stuff — it has not worked, and not for lack of trying.
I think it's only in the last few years that I've made the shift myself — and that's through the help of an excellent therapist. Because I've swallowed the pill, as it were. I drank the Kool Aid.
I'm still in the process of realigning myself about a lot of this stuff. So that's where I am at the moment.
Fat shaming — and fighting back
Let's face it: these types of anti-fat attitudes have been around forever and we're getting fatter — so it's not working. Aren't these the sorts of people who are always saying if you continue doing the same thing, and aren't getting results, that's the definition of madness?
So to continue shaming people pretending that you're doing it for their health is bulls–t. You're just doing it because you get off on being mean. And that's a matter for those people to look at, because surely by now they should realise that they've said these things to fat people and it hasn't helped them.
To end the stigma against fat people would mean, apart from anything else, it would reduce our cortisol levels — and we know that cortisol levels contribute to people being fat.
I don't know if the nastiness was there when I was younger or whether people just kept it to themselves or what's going on, but it does seem that it's more febrile now and more volatile.
They feel that they can go at me for being fat because they assume that everyone's on board with the character judgement. It also bleeds into online aggression against women, that people don't like women having a voice.
But I think, actually, it completely backfires on them. I'm using the comments to springboard into making some points for the benefit of other people who are watching — not them, I'm never going to change their minds.
And through that conversation, I also get enormous amounts of support, and through that conversation, I can help tease out and demonstrate exactly what I'm up against and what we're up against.
I'm not saying the toxicity doesn't affect me, but I'm not cowed by it. However, I also don't necessarily want to go and bathe in that sewer all the time.
Magda's Big National Health Check starts on Tuesday, 1 November, at 8.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iView.
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